Dylan Love, provided by |
May 15, 2013

Steve Jobs specifically is being painted as the brains behind a plan that would lead to higher e-book prices for consumers.

The DOJ released an email between James Murdoch of News Corporation and Jobs. In it, Jobs wrote Murdoch should "throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream e-books market at $12.99 and $14.99."

The Justice Department points to this email as evidence of e-book price fixing designed to get Amazon to raise its prices to similar numbers, placating publishers in the process.

It gets a little more damning. Apple allegedly used its App Store ecosystem to push around publishers that weren't on board. From the NYT report:

"After Random House finally agreed to a contract on Jan. 18, 2011, Eddy Cue, the Apple executive in charge of its e-books deals, sent an e-mail to Mr. Jobs attributing the publisher’s capitulation, in part, to “the fact that I prevented an app from Random House from going live in the app store,” the filing reads. "

Price is one of the things holding us back from going completely digital with our reading material. When the digital version of a book is more expensive than the physical, bound copy, we have a hard time rationalizing a digital purchase.